Twitter As News

Twitter has long been talked about as a news source. If it ever decides to work as a news source, or if we ever decide to actually use it as one, there will be two parts:

The raw news will be complete madness, and everybody will be allowed in.

Many somebodies, from many different groups and interests, will harness the madness into usefulness.

This is easier (ha) than it sounds.

Six degrees of separation, or something similar to that, will determine that I as an editor/publisher can choose my trusted raw news sources that cover my area of interest. If I’m looking for local news in my town of 30,000, I only need a handful of trusted sources sending out raw news in order for me to edit/publish an aggregation of news for that locality. A larger city (Chicago) only requires a handful more sources.

For edit/publishing tasks, I will have a way to strip out tweets that are unrelated from that stream and a way to categorize the tweets that are related. Once a category (story) has valuable information from enough sources, it will be published. Once published, it remains alive. I can remove/add information and sources. Everyone can react, republish, comment, or do whatever they would like with that story.